Louis Calaferte / Catherine Seghers - Théâtre complet : Pièces baroques - 1994-1996

Complete Theatre — Baroque Plays (volumes I, II and III), by Louis Calaferte

Illustrated with monotypes by Catherine Seghers

Published between 1994 and 1996 by Hesse editions, the Baroque Plays form, together with the preceding volume of intimate plays, the full collection of Louis Calaferte's complete theatre. While the intimate plays staged familiar closed-rooms, characters curled up in their domestic frustrations, the baroque plays unfold a deliberately cruel register, where the author’s language becomes more experimental and the staging of bodies and situations more extravagant. This editorial project, begun during the writer’s lifetime but completed after his death on June 2, 1994, a few weeks after the publication of the first two volumes, constitutes the first comprehensive publication of a dramatic œuvre that had hitherto been scattered and largely little known, Calaferte having been chiefly identified with his novels and his voluminous Notebooks. It contributed to a critical reevaluation of the scope of his work for the stage, previously eclipsed by the impact of Septentrion.

Louis Calaferte was born on July 14, 1928 in Turin, into a family of Italian emigrants settled in France. A caddie/driver from the age of thirteen in a factory, then a laborer, he educated himself and published Requiem of the Innocents in 1952, which enjoyed some success. Settling in 1956 in Mornant, in the Lyonnais mountains, he wrote Septentrion there, a novel of a crudity then deemed pornographic, censored and banned from sale, which would not be republished until twenty years later by Gérard Bourgadier at Denoël. A prolific poet, novelist, playwright and diarist, he left a considerable body of work, still largely rediscovered after his death in 1994.

Paris, Hesse editions, 1994 (volumes I and II) and April 1996 (volume III); 15 x 23 cm, paperback; 413, 440 and 205 pages respectively. Various signs of rubbing on the covers and the lower edge of the two first volumes."} }{